A Simple Solution for the Phase Offset Estimation of Airborne SAR Interferograms Without Using Corner Reflectors

We present a solution for simplifying a recently proposed two-step processing technique that allows to retrieve the constant phase offset present in the unwrapped synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferograms by exploiting an external, even low-accuracy, digital elevation model (DEM) of the illuminated area and without using corner reflectors. In particular, we show in this letter that the second processing step, namely, the slope-topography-based estimate, can be avoided without impairing the accuracy of the final phase offset estimate. To this aim, we introduce a simple modification to the first step, referred to as phase-based estimate, by considering the vertical bias of the available external DEM as the second unknown parameter in the carried out estimation. The simplified algorithm is very easy to implement and is particularly suitable for airborne SAR interferometry. It has been tested on real airborne SAR data and the obtained results show that the achieved accuracy is the same or better than that achieved through the original two-step approach.